It was a rainy day. The sky was a dark, ominous grey overcast. Jason’s green umbrella was thick with the droplets from an earlier downpour. At this moment, there was stillness. The strangest thing had happened. The world had turned grey and stopped moving.
All around him, the raindrops floated without falling, stationary little beads that seemed to hang in the air. Like time had stopped. Jason stood at the bus stop and poked a single drop in front of him. It felt smooth, like ice but warmer. It seemed fixed in place until he pushed harder. It seemed like colour spread from his fingertips into the droplet, and suddenly it burst apart. It was then that he noticed that he wasn’t the only colour in the world.
A girl in a red raincoat stood on the other side of the street. She raised her right hand and pointed with her index finger at Jason.
“You’re late!” she shouted across the street at Jason, who was understandably confused by this strange girl.
“Do me a favour and die quietly!” she shouted as suddenly a burst of brilliant light exploded out in front of her index finger. A beam of light shot out towards Jason, who at this point was too stunned to react. Right before the beam reached him, it split and went around him, as if an invisible bubble protected him.
“You on the other hand are right on time!” another female voice shouted, seemingly out of nowhere but close to where Jason stood. As if on cue, a girl in a grey peacoat appeared where the voice had come from.
The girl in the red raincoat appraised the new intruder for a moment. The two girls stared at one another, as if sizing each other up in their minds.
“Not worth the effort…” mumbled the girl in the red raincoat. And with that her form vanished, and the greyness around them turned into colour. All at once the raindrops fell again.
Jason looked around at the bus stop. He was alone. Something strange had just happened right? He… he couldn’t remember what exactly. It was probably nothing. He continued to stand, waiting for the bus.
The girl in the grey peacoat stood at the edge of the rooftop, staring down at the bus stop where Jason was getting onto the bus. As it departed, she turned towards a boy in a navy-blue jacket who stood nearby, also on the rooftop.
“She’s going to be trouble,” said the girl in the grey peacoat. “We can’t always watch him.”
“You think she knows our rotations?” said the boy in the navy-blue jacket.
“She’s testing for them now, isn’t she?” replied the girl in the grey peacoat. “It’s only a matter of time before she finds a hole.”
“We should ask HQ for authorization then,” said the boy in the navy-blue jacket.
“Before we resort to that, I want to see if I can reason with her…” said the girl.
“You wish to parley with the enemy? I don’t see that being approved, even if one of your copies was a diplomatic model once,” the boy said.
“They keep sending versions of her. We need to know why,” replied the girl.
“You know capture is impossible with these models. They always self-destruct,” said the boy.
“Maybe we need to be more creative…” said the girl.
And with that the rooftop was empty.
Jason Eisenburg believed that he lived a boring, mundane life. Every day he would wake up and take the bus to his university campus, where he’d attend monotone lectures about theoretical physics. He struggled at times to remember why he bothered to do this. When he did remember, it was because he was obsessed with one thing. Time travel.
As a lowly physics grad student, it didn’t occur to him that his obsession would matter one day, or that he would be important enough for the powers that be to fight over. To him, the question was rather, could it be done? Was this theoretical concept even possible in reality? He wanted to know. He wanted to know so that he could know whether or not he could go back and save her…
Jason didn’t like hospitals. The smell of antiseptic. The tall grey monuments to the dying. The waiting for any news, any update on a loved one’s desperate condition. Today he walked through the corridor towards the room he’d visited countless times. He opened the door to the dimly lit room, a red raincoat on a hanger on the wall.
“You’re late!” shouted a weak female voice. A figure on a bed in the corner pointed her index finger accusingly at Jason.
“I’m sorry, I missed the first bus again,” replied Jason.
“If you keep being late, you’ll miss out on important things!” shouted the girl.
“I know, I know,” said Jason, chuckling slightly. Then, he brought out the first gift. It was yet another teddy bear.
“Throw it in with the collection!” laughed the girl gleefully, surrounded as she was by stuffed animals on the bed.
“I also got you Hawking’s new book,” said Jason. He pulled the book out from his bag and placed it gently in the hands of the girl.
“Ohh, danke!” said the girl eagerly. She held up the book, the sunlight from the window glistening off the cover. She’d read all the others already. Her obsession with physics knew no bounds. He, on the other hand, had trouble staying awake in the lectures he would later attend, years after she passed away.
“Time travel is dangerous,” said Professor Eisenburg matter-of-factly. “The very nature of reality conspires against it by only allowing a certain probability mass of possible worlds to be changed by the mere act of time travel…”
It had been years since those heady days when he could barely stay awake in lectures. Now he was the one giving them.
“…The mere act of time travel thus splits the multiverse into two equally sized streams of reality…”
Now he was lecturing about the very thing he had hoped so long ago was possible.
“…Reality which from the perspective of the time traveller in the new universe is changed, but from the perspective of an observer in the original universe, remains unperturbed…”
If only he had been wrong.
The girl in the grey peacoat walked through the hospital corridor. She stopped at a nameplate: Rosa Eisenburg. Tentatively, she opened the door to the unfamiliar room.
A girl on her death bed lay in a confusion of tubes and stuffed animals. She snored lightly.
Quietly the girl in the grey peacoat pulled out a small crystal-like device. It lifted itself into the air and hovered above Rosa, emitting a faint light. An aerosol of thousands of tiny nanomachines went to work, entering Rosa’s airway and clearing Rosa’s bloodstream of the cancerous cells that threatened her life. The device returned to the girl in the grey peacoat, who quietly walked out of the room. A nurse nearby seemed unaware of the girl’s presence. The girl left the hospital, her mission accomplished.
Sometimes they say that fate conspires to make fools of us.
Jason was waiting at the lights when his cellphone rang.
“Hello?” said Jason to the phone.
“You won’t believe what the doctors are saying!” yelled Rosa.
“Oh?” replied Jason. The light had turned green.
“They say it’s full remission! I can go home!” said Rosa excitedly.
“That’s wonder—" started Jason.
The force of the car that struck him knocked the cellphone out of his hand.
“Yay!” said Rosa. “Can you come and pick me up?”
“…”
“Hello?” said Rosa.
Rosa decided she would change the world. She started by enrolling at Caltech and then doing her Phd at MIT. She cared about only one thing. Time travel. She would save Jason with it, somehow.
“Time travel is dangerous,” said Professor Eisenburg matter-of-factly. “The very nature of reality conspires against it by only allowing a certain probability mass of possible worlds to be changed by the mere act of time travel…”
It had been years since those heady days when she had obsessively listened to lectures. Now she was the one giving them.
“…The mere act of time travel thus splits the multiverse into two equally sized streams of reality…”
Now she was lecturing about the very thing she had hoped so long ago to achieve.
“…Reality which from the perspective of the time traveller in the new universe is changed, but from the perspective of an observer in the original universe, remains unperturbed…”
If only she hadn’t. Then perhaps the cycle could end. Instead, there was the echo of fates intertwined, an endless dance of tragedies.
“I just want it to end,” said Rosa in her red raincoat. She stood atop a lamppost, its light flickering in the night.
“Authorization granted,” said the boy in the navy-blue jacket. He stood on a rooftop, observing.
“Proceeding,” replied the girl in the grey peacoat. She stood on the sidewalk.
The world around them turned greyscale.
“Let me end the loop!” shouted Rosa. With sudden anger she pointed her hand and index finger at the girl in the grey peacoat and a blast of light shot outwards towards the girl.
The girl vanished and the blast struck the pavement, burning it to a crisp. A second later, the girl reappeared, this time floating in the sky. A hundred icy spikes exploded out from behind her towards Rosa.
Rosa put her hands up and a bubble of light encased her. The icy spikes struck the bubble, penetrating it, but not reaching her. She barely had time to gasp as the girl in the grey peacoat suddenly appeared behind her with a blade.
“Please surrender,” said the girl in the grey peacoat.
“I can’t,” said Rosa. “You know I can’t.” She started to spin around and pointed in the general direction of the girl, a burst of light firing from her fingertip.
“I’m sorry,” said the girl as she stuck the blade in Rosa’s back. It seemed like lightning struck Rosa. Her form immediately wavered and then dissipated into dust, which drifted away.
The girl in the grey peacoat stood in the greyness as colour returned to the world.
She looked around her. “Why do we do this?”
“The mission takes precedence,” said the boy in the navy-blue jacket. “You didn’t even need my help this time.”
“No, I mean, aren’t we supposed to save her?” said the girl.
“She’s a copy made by the enemy,” said the boy. “Even if she resembles the protectorate, in reality, she isn’t. Her words are meant to throw you off, cause you to doubt. If they bother you, we can have them erased from memory.”
“No, it’s fine,” said the girl, regaining her composure. “The mission takes precedence.”
The girl in the grey peacoat looked up at the sky with its countless stars and then at her hand. She opened it and let the dust float away and into the night.